Lt. Gen. James McLaughlin, deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, announced at the TechNet Pacific conference that he expects a Cyber Command force of some 6,000 personnel to be in place by the end of 2016, with 2,400 staffers having been hired since 2013.
“That’s something that’s in play right now,” McLaughlin said.
“They’re basically tactical units.”
The Cyber Mission Force will be organized into 133 individual teams tasked with different responsibilities.
“A few of the combatant commands — based on just the scope of responsibility and base of operation — have more of the teams than others, but every combatant command is being supported,” McLaughlin said.
“We’re just beginning to have these teams formed. The real challenge for some of the teams is because of the infancy of the domain,” referring to the cyberspace operations domain.
McLaughlin said it is long long process to get the right people in the right positions, and that Cyber Command will be seeking to hire more personnel to fill some of the higher-level leadership roles.
“We need additional people to work the command and control, those intermediate-level set of tasks either in our combatant commands or in our service components that really translates senior-commander intent into plans and then into operations that the lead commander can then control,” he said.
“We don’t have weeks,” McLaughlin said. “A lot of what we’re doing today is reacting to what happened, so we spend a lot of our time chasing our tails in the cyber command.”
